Free James Potter And The Morrigan Web by George Norman Lippert

Event. The program is already in place and doing its work. It will search out every cell phone, every home computer, every Internet-connected device on earth. When it finds what it is looking for, it will delete it. Once the footage of tonight’s unfortunate revelation is deleted, no one will ever be able to prove it happened.”
    “But—but people will remember it!” Drummond spluttered.
    Lynch merely rolled his eyes. “You need to read more George Orwell, Mr. President. Memory is the most easily manipulated thing on earth. Trust us. We know what we are doing.”
    And apparently they had.
    By the next morning, footage of the Event had almost entirely ceased to be broadcast. Still, the news networks talked endlessly about what had happened, offering all sorts of speculation and conspiracy. Fortunately (amazingly) very few commentators seemed to be considering the most obvious explanation of all—that a secretly magical city had been revealed to the world at large. Instead, there was talk of government mind control experiments, or mass hypnosis, or even alien involvement. After all, it had only been a year since the mysterious “magic trick” that had resulted in the Chrysler Building’s relocation to the jungles of Venezuela. That had been blamed on alien technology, and perhaps outright extra-terrestrial involvement. It only made sense that those same mysterious aliens might be responsible for the phenomena that had seemed to happen in New York City.
    “It might not have even happened at all,” said one commentator, a NASA astrophysicist with heavy glasses and almost no hair. “The images that we all saw that night might have been a complete fiction, created by outside forces and fed directly into the cameras by some sort of broadcasting beam. It might be that the Statue of Liberty still stands just as always, and that what we all witnessed was, essentially, alien special effects.”
    It all seemed so plausible that even President Drummond wanted to believe it.
    In the days that followed the Event, he signed orders that evacuated the entire population of Manhattan Island and erected a quarantine zone all around it. A no-fly zone was established over much of the eastern seaboard and coast guard cutters patrolled the waters for a ten mile perimeter around New York City. At Lynch’s recommendation, Drummond had offered almost no official explanation for these maneuvers.
    “Let the press make up their own story,” he had said wryly. “They’re better at it than we are.”
    And, of course, he had been right. The news networks speculated that the military perimeter was a safety measure, established in the event that alien radiation might have affected the site of the Event.
    And slowly, incredibly, life had seemed to go on.
    The New York Stock Exchange had been relocated to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where a massive team of computer technicians had established a surprisingly functional international network in a matter of days. Most of the million and a half residents of Manhattan had gone through a short but intensive debriefing session, run by Mr. Lynch himself, and had emerged strangely baffled about the night of the Memorial Day parade. Most seemed to remember very little of the Event, or remembered it rather differently than it seemed to have happened. This, Drummond knew, was because of the influence of a team of wizard memory specialists in the employ of the Magical Integration Bureau. They were performing something called “Obliviations” on the witnesses, removing and altering their memories of that night. It was a painstaking process, but it was apparently necessary.
    Drummond did not like any of it, but felt he had no other options.
    Eventually, he held his first press conference about the Event. It was an unmitigated disaster. He could neither deny nor confirm the possibility of supposed alien involvement. He could not provide an exact date for when the island of Manhattan would be